As I noted yesterday, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a special section in its latest issue devoted to the question, “Is free will an illusion?” I’d like to give my brief (I hope!) reaction to each of the five essays (I don’t include mine).
Note first that every writer affirms that there is no dualism: our choices are purely products of a material brain. The ineluctable conclusion is that determinism reigns, so that contracausal free will is indeed an illusion. But many nevertheless try to save the concept of free will. Now I know that compatibilism (the idea the free will is compatible with physical determinism) has a long history, even preceding modern neurobiology’s finding that there is no “spooky” soul that can direct our choices.
But many compatibilist philosophers try to save the “notion” of free will by separating it from its historical definition (“I could have chosen otherwise”). Some of this effort is admirable, as when philosophers try to square determinism with how we think about “moral responsibility,” or how we might change our system of punishments and rewards in light of science. But other thinkers seem to me to engage in rearguard philosophy—trying to save the notion that we are free agents, since that notion is so ingrained in us. The latter tactic approaches the method of theology: the post facto rationalization of a comforting fiction that must be saved in the face of contrary scientific evidence.
Alfred R.Mele, “The case against the case against free will”. Mele notes that he is director of a big Templeton Foundation initiative on free will. His first assertion is that, contrary to my claim, most people don’t have an intuitive view of free will that is dualistic; they don’t really think that their choices aren’t determined. His evidence is this:
But philosophers don’t own this expression. If anyone owns it, people in general do. So I conducted some simple studies.
In one, I invited participants to imagine a scenario in which scientists had proved that everything in the universe is physical and that what we refer to as a “mind” is actually a brain at work. In this scenario, a man sees a $20 bill fall from a stranger’s pocket, considers returning it, and decides to keep it. Asked whether he had free will when he made that decision, 73 percent answer yes. This study suggests that a majority of people do not see having a nonphysical mind or soul as a requirement for free will.
To me this doesn’t say much about whether most people view free will as contracausal. They are told that “everything is physical” and that a mind is a “brain at work,” but it’s not obvious that they conclude from this that all actions are predetermined by physical processes. Accepting the scientific scenario may just be something people do to go along with the experimenter; it’s not at all clear that they think deeply about what it means vis-à-vis their actions. I am not convinced by this description of the study (n.b.: I haven’t read the study) that most people aren’t determinists. Drawing that conclusion, I’ve found, requires engaging in long conversations with people to explore their thoughts; I doubt it can be derived from a single quick question.
Mele then criticizes the experiments by Soon et. al. (and by extension that of Libet) showing that neurological scans can predict decisions before the decider is conscious of having decided. He notes that the accuracy is only 60% (I think it’s up to 70%) in some experiments, and that he could do nearly as well with the 50% accuracy of a coin toss. This is fatuous. It’s early days yet, and we may be able to predict decisions in advance with substantially more accuracy when we know more about the brain. He concludes that there is only a “slight unconscious bias toward a particular button.” But that misses the point that the “bias” can be seen in the brain before the subject is conscious of it, and, as I recall, there were no biases towards pressing the left or right button, which renders Mele’s conclusion completely wrong.
Finally, Mele doesn’t define what he means by free will, which makes his essay useless.
Michael Gazzaniga: “Free will is an illusion, but you’re still responsible for your actions.“ I like this essay, probably because, by and large, Gazzaniga agrees with me. He’s absolutely insistent on determinism and thinks the concept of free will is incoherent:
Neuroscience reveals that the concept of free will is without meaning, just as John Locke suggested in the 17th century. Do robots have free will? Do ants have free will? Do chimps have free will? Is there really something in all of these machines that needs to be free, and if so, from what? Alas, just as we have learned that the world is not flat, neuroscience, with its ever-increasing mechanistic understanding of how the brain enables mind, suggests that there is no one thing in us pulling the levers and in charge. It’s time to get over the idea of free will and move on.
But he wants to save the idea of personal responsibility nonetheless. Well, I agree with him in the sense that people must be held accountable for their acts. Absent accountability, punishment, and the like, society couldn’t function. But he sneaks in a sort of anti-determinism when he says that people are responsible in the sense that they can choose whether to follow society’s rules:
Holding people responsible for their actions remains untouched and intact since that is a value granted by society. We all learn and obey rules, both personal and social. Following social rules, as they say, is part of our DNA. Virtually every human can follow rules no matter what mental state he or she is in.
Thus Jared Loughner, who has been charged with shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords, is judged to be insane. Yet he followed one kind of rule when he stopped to make change for the taxi driver on the way to murder and cause mayhem. Should society really allow that the act of not following another kind of rule (not to kill anyone) be accepted as an excuse for murder? Since responsibility exists as a rule of social interaction and not normal, or even abnormal brain processes, it makes no sense to excuse the breaking of one kind of social rule but not another.
The flaw here is this: if our actions really are predetermined, how can we “choose” whether or not to follow the rules? Loughner was predetermined to make change for the driver, but predetermined to kill as well. What is the contradiction in that? He followed the rules in one case but not the other, but in what sense was he making free “choices”? And who on earth is “excusing” breaking one kind of social rule but not another? Breaking a “no murder” rule is far more serious than not making change properly; neither is in the strict sense “excusable,” but flouting one rule is far more serious than flouting another, and society comes down far harder on murder than on not making change. This is proper, for punishing severe violations of the social order has more salutary consequences: it affects both the miscreant’s brain and those of onlookers, prompting the former, perhaps, to reform and the latter to not emulate Loughner. Excessive punishment for small infractions is damaging to society.
Outside of that, I agree with Gazzaniga’s conclusion that people are accountable but we need to take into account determinism when thinking over how we punish wrongdoers. The problem is that he uses “responsibility” in the sense of “that person did it”, while many conceive of the word as meaning “that person had a choice whether to do it.” I agree with the former but not the latter, which is what I see as the erroneous notion of “moral responsibility.” To me, moral responsibility implies true choice.
Hilary Bok, “Want to understand free will? Don’t look to neuroscience.” Bok, a philosopher, seems to be taking the theological route, trying to preserve our feeling that we’re free by defining free will in a way that allows it. She doesn’t want to go where the science takes us, I think, but prefers to engage in semantics:
The problem of free will for compatibilists is not to preserve a role for deliberation and choice in the face of explanations that threaten them with elimination; it is to explain how, once our minds and our choices have been thoroughly naturalized, we can provide an adequate account of human agency and freedom.
How can we reconcile the idea that our choices have scientific explanations with the idea that we are free?
But that “adequate account” of agency must come from science, not philosophy. And what does she mean by “freedom”? She never defines it (a flaw in some of these essays) unless she means “our feeling that we decide freely.”
In the end, she takes what I see as a philosophical cop-out, i.e., free will lies in our ability to make seemingly reasoned choices:
A person whose actions depend on her choices has alternatives; if she is, in addition, capable of stepping back from her existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among them, then, according to compatibilists, she is free.
But what is it mean to be “free” if the decisions we make after “reasoning” about them (a process that of course is not free, but itself determined by physics), were determined in advance? That just gives us the feeling of freedom, but not actual freedom. If you want to take the former to be the latter, fine, but then admit that even one’s reasoning is determined. In this sense humans have free will in the same way that crows or chimps do—animals that also “reason.” If by “free will” we mean the Dennett-ian sense that “we are highly evolve beasts to take in and mull over inputs before coughing up an output,” then we should simply say “decisions arrived at after pondering” rather than “decisions made by free will.” It’s so much less confusing that way, and jettisons the historical and religious baggage associated with free will.
Owen Jones, “The end of (discussing) free will.” I like this piece, first because of Jones’s explicit rejection of non-determinism:
The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop. Free will is to human behavior what a perfect vacuum is to terrestrial physics—a largely abstract endpoint from which to begin thinking, before immediately moving on to consider and confront the practical frictions of daily existence.
I do get it. People don’t like to be caused. It conflicts with their preference to be fully self-actualized. So it is understandable that, at base, free-will discussions tend to center on whether people have the ability to make choices uncaused by anything other than themselves. But there’s a clear answer: They don’t. Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy.)
Too many philosophers (and others) aren’t willing to make a statement this strong and true. You’ve probably seen—on this website and elsewhere—people saying that we shouldn’t go around proclaiming determinism because it’s bad for people to think that their actions are all predetermined. But if Mele is right, and most people don’t think that, then what’s the harm? (I don’t think Mele is right.)
And I like Jones’s clear statement that our understanding of determinism has real implications for the law, and for punishment. I agree with him 100% here:
Which brings us to law. How will insights from the brain sciences affect the ways we assess a person’s responsibility for bad behavior? Answer: only somewhat, but sometimes significantly. Many people assume that legal responsibility requires free will, such that an absence of free will necessarily implies an absence of responsibility. Not true, as many scholars have amply demonstrated. Full, complete, utterly unconstrained freedom to choose among available actions might be nice to have, but it is not in fact necessary for a fair and functioning legal system.
This is not to say that degrees of freedom are irrelevant to law. Science hasn’t killed free will. But it has clarified various factors—social, economic, cultural, and biological in nature—that constrain it.
My single quibble with Jones here: his statement that “science hasn’t killed free will.” But he implied earlier that there’s no such thing as free will! If he thinks there’s a form of free will that remains viable, he needs to define it. He doesn’t, which is a flaw in an otherwise admirable piece.
Paul Bloom, “Free will does not exist. So what?” Bloom’s thesis is that we’ve long known that determinism rules, so there can’t be contracausal free will. But his take is that it doesn’t matter:
Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.
I agree with the consensus, but it’s not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn’t news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It’s long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?
But he then falls into the same trap as Bok: true free will comes from the facct that our predetermined decisions are produced after a process of deliberation:
More important, it’s not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will. Some neuroscientists claim that it entails giving up on the notion of moral responsibility. There is no actual distinction, they argue, between someone who is violent because of a large tumor in his brain and a neurologically normal premeditated killer—both are influenced by forces beyond their control, after all—and we should revise the criminal system accordingly. Other researchers connect the denial of free will with the view that conscious deliberation is impotent. We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do. To claim that people consciously mull over decisions and think about arguments is to be in the grips of a prescientific conception of human nature.
I think those claims are mistaken. In any case, none of them follow from determinism. Most of all, the deterministic nature of the universe is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought. These (physical and determined) processes can influence our actions and our thoughts, in the same way that the (physical and determined) workings of a computer can influence its output. It is wrong, then, to think that one can escape from the world of physical causation—but it is not wrong to think that one can think, that we can mull over arguments, weigh the options, and sometimes come to a conclusion. After all, what are you doing now?
But exactly how is this claim mistaken: “We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do. To claim that people consciously mull over decisions and think about arguments is to be in the grips of a prescientific conception of human nature.”? That seems pretty accurate to me; in fact, it’s what Bloom agreed with at the outset.
I agree that our predetermined decisions arrive after humans appear to think about stuff, but those decisions remain predetermined. In what sense, then, is there any “freedom”? To me, the claim that “conscious deliberation and rational thought” can affect our decisions is a form of snuck-in dualism, for those thought processes themselves are based on the laws of physics, and their outcome is determined. External forces like other people, or insults to the brain, can affect the output, but the deliberations themselves cannot. That is dualism.
***
In the sense that any of these thinkers agree that our will is “free,” they mean that some of our decisions appear to be made after conscious processes of deliberation—after thinking about them. Of course, that’s a result of evolution, and many animals probably do the same thing. Perhaps these folks will agree that humans aren’t unique in having this form of “free will,” for all beasts are evolved to absorb and process input before producing a behavioral output. But where is the “freedom” in all this? What, exactly, are we free to do? We’re not free to think—that’s a result of evolution—and we’re not free in how our thought processes operate, or in what “decision” they produce. Perhaps some readers can explain to me what the “freedom” is in this form of free will. I don’t get it. Sure, we can mull over things more than, say, a slug, but so what? Our form of “mulling over things” is merely a more sophisticated version of what a slug does when it surveys its environment, and there’s no qualitative difference in either the determinism or in the way the nerves and ganglia work.
Pray where, oh where, is all that vaunted “freedom”?
mulling
Verb:
1. Think about (a fact, proposal, or request) deeply and at length: “she began to mull over the various possibilities”.
2. Warm (a beverage, esp. wine, beer, or cider) and add spices and sweetening to it.
Can we now eliminate the first definition? The second is more fun anyway.
NEB,
After mulling on your question, I came to conclude that we can still keep the first definition.
The illustrative example in Bloom’s piece is: “… in the same way that the (physical and determined) workings of a computer can influence its output”. The “computer” is “free” to give a number of different responses in different situations according to its programming.
Those responses are of course entirely determined by those situations and that programming, but the point is that the word “free” is being used where the internal motivations (physically determined internal motivations of course) of the brain/computer have a large effect on the outcome.
This of course is a very, very, very different use of the word “freedom” than the traditional dualist “true” freedom. But it is the only sort of “freedom” that exists!
Compatibilists do know that this is not dualist freedom, it is a very different beast — and you can argue about whether using the same word “free” is appropriate, but then that is simply an argument about semantics.
If you insist that words such as “freedom”, “choice”, “decision” can only be used for phenomena that do not exist then you need to re-write much of the English language.
I think you make an undesirable case. Choice can still be talked about as long as we understand that it is always a fully determined choice, like those of the fully programmed computer. Same with the word decision. As to the word freedom, we still can employ this word in all its very relative degrees. Freedom from external governmental regulations, for example, might be on some scale, whereas libertarian freedom of the individual would be absolute zero.
I’d agree that choice/decision can be used without much re-working of the language to formalize it. I think Turing did most of the necessary heavy lifting in his work on automata theory. (The may be some subtle philosophy headaches for the due to the distinction between a decision algorithm and a recognition algorithm, but I expect it will be easier to get mathematicians than philosophers to work out resolutions of the headaches and give translations with some correspondence to conventional use.)
Free/freedom then retains another mathematically conventional sense: that of a “free variable”. In so far as the input tape to the decision algorithm has not been specified, it may be represented by a free variable; and the choice resulting is a free choice.
I’m not seeing how freedom from regulation could be directly conceptualized in terms of a free variable, however. Rather, that sense of “freedom from” would seem a slightly different sense – a zero term, multiplication of which gives some other inputs (such as propensity for authority response) a zero contribution to the range of outputs. There’s probably some relation, in that for a system of linear equations the determinant of the coefficient matrix is zero iff there is at least one free variable.
I think ordinary usage is a problem here. I would guess that the use of “choice” and “decision” in computer science is a specialized meaning, adapted or modified from the ordinary meaning, and that it is simply not understood outside that area of expertise. In ordinary usage, I think these words imply the freedom to choose and the freedom to decide for yourself. So you would need to rewrite the language for common usage. As one example, when the issue of “crime and punishment” is raised, are we or are we not really talking about something analagous to training a badly behaved pet, with the training adjusted to suit the behavior? Should we start talking about operant conditioning at this point? Or “A Clockwork Orange”?
The vast majority of the uses of “free” do not connote any contra-causal violation of physical determinism. Some examples:
A free lunch
Buy one get one free
Free speech
Freed from jail
Free energy (physics)
Free radical (chemistry)
Religious freedom
Free from interference
etc, etc.
CB,
Surely you’ve heard there aint no such thing as a free lunch.
The technical terms are adapted and refined from the more ordinary meaning. However, this seems likely to be not much more (nor less) of a difficulty than the precision with which “force” is defined for physics.
So now, Jerry is a mindless robot or a crow, and can’t help writing insane articles on free-will.
Otherwise, 99% of the rest of the time, he writes mindfully on other matters.
?
I presume this is an insult rather than a substantive point.
No it is not an insult, but your article is an insult if you truly believe you’re a mindless robot. Are you really a mindless robot or do you have a mind? Which is it Jerry?
And I was giving you a compliment. I said 99% of the time you write mindfully, but of course, you got upset at the idea of you being a mindless robot, which I presume was the point of your article above.
Egbert,
Maybe it was “can’t help writing insane articles” that was insulting???? Not many sane people like their words being alluded to as insane.
Can a mindless robot be sane or insane?
It almost sounds like you’re supposing that *how* our mind reaches conclusions is somehow relevant, but Coyne has told us that such claims are merely a sophistical attempt to smuggle in dualism.
Ask, HAL.
I’m sorry, Steve. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
All things considered, I’d rather be a crow.
If I had a choice in the matter.
I’ve been very ‘deterministic’ for a very long time. But I also say we have very nice illusion of free will that’s, as far we can tell, indistinguishable from what real ‘free-will’ would probably look like.
moseszd,
Interesting supposition, but since you’ve only had the illusion of free will, and since you can only have the illusion of free will, what do you imagine “real” free will would be like?
I’ve always maintained that the free will illusion was particularly persistent and pervasive, but your notion that this illusion is also perfect, in so much as it perfectly parrots what real free will would be like if real free will existed.
I suppose the notion that we are entirely made up of stuff that must obey laws of physics can cause a discomforting identity crisis, which is why I think most people are keen to hold on to the notion of free will at all costs. Our thoughts do seem to spring from an undetermined place, where most people will want to anchor their identity. The idea that our identity could be tinkered with, controlled, or be the inevitable result of outside physical forces is very scary, but so far that does seem to be the case.
There is no point arguing over the inevitability of the future. Only one scenario is ever able to play out at a specific time, so we can never test the absolute version of “I could have done differently”. On the other side, there will always be factors that we cannot account for, so absolute predictions of actions are impossible as well. There will never be empirical data to solve this conflict to the satisfaction of either side. We are left with endless blog arguments.
Perhaps non-free will enlightenment will never be universally obtained, only time will tell. But I think we shall see as we gain more empirical data on how the brain does what it does, that the free will illusion will lessen.
Jerry, Agreed with most of your argument in the Chronicle piece. But the following section is problematic:
“If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility… That realization shouldn’t seriously change the way we punish or reward people, because we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus.”
You say that we should still punish criminals, even though we don’t have free will or moral responsibility. But this is illogical, and it raises a conundrum. If we don’t have free will, then there is no sense in your exhorting us to do anything (we don’t have a choice in the matter of whether or not we punish criminals). Conversely, if we do have free will and moral responsibility then there is no need to re-assure us that punishing criminals is useful.
Nope, I don’t see that as problematic at all. True, I have no choice about what I exhort people to do. BUT, my exhortations have real effects on people because they chemically affect their brains and their actions. You CAN “change your mind” about how you punish criminals based on the arguments that you hear and how those affect your brain.
Persuasion and changing minds are perfectly plausible with determinism; what is not plausible is whether or not you have a choice in making an argument, and whether or not the person listening to it has a choice in whether they change their minds.
Agreed, of course, that your exhortation has effects on others, etc.
But still troubled by the word “should” in the exhortation “You should do X”. The word “should” makes sense only if the agent has a choice in doing X or ~X. An impersonal exhortation along the lines of “Doing X is good” makes more sense to me.
I dunno, I’ve modified the behavior of a great number of molecular puppets over the course of my lifetime, by using this “should” word. It’s very powerful, precisely because the agent doesn’t have a choice. My exhortation will either work, or it won’t. But it certainly does work some of the time!
You say that by exhortating in this blog (sorry, website) that you can affect what I do. If so, then by exhortating yourself (in your mind), you can affect what you do. Is that not basically free will (of the non-magical kind)?
Neil,
To answer your question: no.
Where is the crucial element of freedom in your proposal? All you have is him non-freely exhortating [sic] to himself in an internal loop. There’s no freedom in that.
I find it somewhat contradictory to believe that formulating an argument and presenting it to another (“This action is unwise because…”) can alter the action another body takes, but that formulating an argument in my conscious mind cannot alter the action my body takes.
As for it being a loop, so what? Who said the process is recursive as some incompatibilists describe it.
As for freedom from what–not freedom from the laws of nature, that is for sure, but perhaps freedom from an innate or conditioned response.
Jerry,
You and others often give that reply to this accusation of inconsistency in your arguement.
I for one (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) hae pointed out numerous times here that such a response is entirely besides the point to the problem being pointed out in your reasoning.
The accusation is that your argument is illogical – NOT that it can’t have physical influence on people.
The example I gave before: If I say: “I don’t have a brother; nonetheless it still follows that I ought to visit my brother on Sundays.”
I would be seen to be speaking nonsense, given that my exhortation to visit my brother comes in the context of my already having denied I have any brother to visit.
Which is why we say that typically “ought” implies “can.”
If the fact that my statements have logically amounted to nonsense (I’ve made a bad argument) is pointed out to me, it would hardly amount to a relevant defense to start pointing out that my statements can physically affect people and have consequences on their actions. None of that addresses whether I have produced a contradiction in my argument.
Similarly, we get your move teling us that it follows we ought to choose one course of action vs another (e.g treat criminal behavior a certain way) after having argued we are to start with accepting we don’t actually have “real” choices. (That, determistically, there never truly is a different option to actions we take).
This is in the same tension, the same incoherence, as the “brother” example. It’s telling us to do things (choose x over y action) while having denied such choice actually exists!
When this logical problem is brought up, its just as beside the point to tell us your prescriptions can have “real physical effects” in the world (influence people’s behavior). Because bad arguments influence behavior all the time. Ccountless illogical exhortations and bad arguments have “real physical effects” on people’s brains and change their behavior (examples flourish in theism – “I can know the bible is true because it declares itself to be true” certainly is a line of “reasoning” that has physically swayed some people’s beliefs and behaviour, but that fact doesn’t mean it’s a bad bit of reasoning).
So you bringing up the fact your argument or recomendations may have a physical influence on behavior does nothing at all to answer whether the logic in the argument makes any sense! It doesnt address the contradiction in your argument.
(That issue aside, I do appreciate and admire the time you have put in to addressing the opposing viewpoints on this subject!)
Thanks,
Vaal
Aaagh. Typo.
The end was to have been:
“I can know the bible is true because it declares itself to be true” certainly is a line of “reasoning” that has physically swayed some people’s beliefs and behaviour, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad bit of reasoning.
Vaal, it seems like you’re saying a contradiction comes in Jerry telling people to do something that is impossible. Assuming I understand you correctly, this is false.
Though our actions are determined, we do not know what action we are eventually going to take until we actually take it. Why? Because we have no idea what events are going to impinge on our thoughts, what distractions will present themselves, what obstacles will get in our way, and what chemical changes in our brain will affect our reasoning during the course of deliberation, or during the time between choosing to do something and actually doing it.
Yes, barring any effects of quantum indeterminacy (or as yet undiscovered randomness in the universe), the entire future of the human race is already determined. But! We do not know how things are going to play out, because we simply don’t have the knowledge or computational power to figure it out. So whatever method of justice the United States ends up adopting, we do not know what it will be, because the future hasn’t happened yet. But I can guarantee you that the relevant decisions will be made based on the values and concerns of the humans involved, and on evaluation of the arguments for and against. Jerry is making an argument, and it will be considered. Rational minds have no choice but to care.
Thanks for your comment Tim.
Tim:Vaal, it seems like you’re saying a contradiction comes in Jerry telling people to do something that is impossible. Assuming I understand you correctly, this is false.
Yes, but “impossible” in the context I’ve been careful to explain.
It’s not strictly “impossible for people to take the specific actions Jerry prescribes, any more than its not strictly “impossible” for someone to eat more fish, should a doctor prescribe it. This is about a particular context.
Further, I can prescribe that you obey the laws of physics. It’s obviously not impossible for you to do so since you are doing it right now. But of course you have no “real” choice NOT to obey the laws of
physics. Given your inability to do otherwise, it makes my sayiNg you ought to obey physics just pointless. Tate the context in which such a prescription makes no sense.
This underscored the concept of “ought implies can” – that not only does it make no sense to tell someone they ought do something they cam not do; it is just as nonsensical to tell someone they ought to do something that they have no choice not to do.
So, Jerry first denies rhat that “real” choice is possible – by saying we can never really do other than what we are determined to do, yet he makes prescriptions that ONLY make sense IF we could do otherwise (make “real” choices).
Jerry is still saying “you ought to choose the hamburger over the hotdog, but pssst – you don’t REALLY Have such a choice.”
The problem of knowledge that you bring up is beside the point. That Jerry’s prescription may be made in ignorance of the future does not touch the fundamental contradiction that he STARTS out with.
Vaal
Vaal,
I thought you had admitted the flaw in this here argument of yours?
So if you tell me I should obey the laws of physics, that’s silly because I’m going to do it anyway, right? I get that.
Jerry’s saying that we ought to change the way we treat criminals, and this is silly because we’re going to change the way we treat criminals anyway?. Well no, we aren’t, not without the argument.
I don’t see a contradiction here. If you insist that there is one, please spell it out in logical step-by-step fashion. As in:
1. A
2. If A, then B
3. ~B
—-therefore—-
4. B (due to 1. and 2.)
5. B & ~B (due to 3. and 4.)
5. of course is a contradiction.
Tim,
Jerry’s saying that we ought to change the way we treat criminals, and this is silly because we’re going to change the way we treat criminals anyway?.
No, that is not the objection. My “laws of physics” example only served to flesh out both sides of the ought-implies-can concept, which was to say that it is nonsensical to exhort someone to do the impossible OR the unavoidable.
First, do you not agree with the standard notion that “ought implies can?”
If not, I’d be very intrigued to see why you would deny it.
But if ought-implies-can is given, I’m not sure why you don’t see Jerry’s inconsistency staring you in the face. The salient point is that this ought-implies-can issue ALWAYS concerns choice or the “ability to do otherwise”. Yet Jerry will say we ought to do X on one hand, while denying our having real choices on the other.
(Sorry…I’m on vacation… Best I can do for the moment)
Vaal
I agree with you about “ought implies can.”
And I still don’t see what your objection is. Jerry is saying that we ought to treat criminals differently than we currently do. It is possible to treat criminals differently than we currently do.
“I have no choice about what I exhort people to do”
What if somebody comes to your place and puts a gun to your head and forces you to exhort people to pray to Jesus? How would you characterize the state of your choice in that hypothetical situation?
And how would you differentiate between that hypothetical scenario and the current one where you are actually able to exhort people about something you presumably want to exhort about, but which you nevertheless say you have “no choice”?
Tim,
“Jerry is saying that we ought to treat criminals differently than we currently do. It is possible to treat criminals differently than we currently do.”
Yes it’s physically possible, but can we say we actually have a CHOICE to either treat a criminal one way vs another? Jerry has denied that we actually have real choices:
JC USA TODAY article: “There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them.”
JC post in this thread: “True, I have no choice about what I exhort people to do…”
You have agreed that ought implies can. Remember, what I’ve pointed out is that ought-implies-can is not simply related to a specific physical possibility (Yes it’s physically possible to treat criminals differently). Rather, the “can” in ought-implies-can is directly related to CHOICE; that is SIMULTANEOUS POSSIBILITIES (more than one option being possible). That is what makes the prescription to obey the laws of physics nonsensical: its physically possible because obviously we are doing it. But, crucially, it is the ONLY option and the lack of “being able to actually choose to do otherwise” is what is missing.
This is the problem Jerry runs into: the fact Jerry has started out by denying actual “choice” or “could choose otherwise” (as he explicitly does, above. Once you’ve denied the validity of there being “real choice” – real alternative possibilities to our decisions – it is nonsensical to then start making prescriptions (“should” “ought”) which require accepting the legitimacy of “choice” and alternate possibilities.
I may choose to start treating criminals differently upon hearing Jerry’s prescription. But Jerry will point out I was determined to do so upon hearing his prescription. That may be a physical fact but if Jerry’s inference from this is to deny that I ever had an actual choice, that STILL renders Jerry’s prescription, his claim of what I “ought” to have done, nonsensical. Because “ought” requires that I did have a choice. The best Jerry is left with is that my actions have indeed been influenced by his nonsensical argument for those actions!
I’d also like to get into the claim you made (which has also been made by others – Jerry too?) that the use of prescriptions like “ought” is made sensible by linking it to our lack of knowledge about the future – that is, the future may be determined, but we do not know the future and it is in this context that somehow justifies our prescriptive language. Having dealt with that claim before, I think it possible to tease out why it makes no sense. But I guess that’s for a future comment.
The thing is, I believe there IS a way to negotiate all this, to make sense of “alternate possibilities” “choice” “could have done otherwise” etc within a fully physical/determinist framework. I can see that Jerry is still going to preserve all the notions of “choice” and “alternate possibilities” both in his day to day language and in his scientific descriptions.
I just don’t find that he is going about it coherently. The problem is, once the kinks are worked out and consistency is brought in, to make sense of keeping some of the concepts Jerry must preserve while acknowledging determinism, it’s going to end in the view compatibility have been giving all along, which Jerry (thinks he) rejects.
🙂
Vaal
(At least that’s what I think until I see a more reasonable account of non-compatibilism)
Ought might imply can, but ought does not necessitate can. In order for your arguments of ought implies can to be valid, ought would have to necessitate can, which it does not.
If I say, “you ought to see your brother this week”, it is deemed unreasonable if you don’t have a brother. But I might not know this crucial fact, and so I might in ignorance advance an impossible ought. But, and this is the fatal flaw in your whole argument, my ought about visiting your brother does not necessitate a can.
Jerry therefore is not in violation of his non-free willistic view when he says the criminal justice system ought be changed. His ought does not necessitate any particular future state of the criminal justice system as you are wont to argue. There is no contradiction.
You may now retire this argument, Vaal, as it has no validity. Anyone who is faced with your argument ought to reply that ought may imply can, but it does not necessitate can, and therefore your argument does not stand.
Steve: If I say, “you ought to see your brother this week”, it is deemed unreasonable if you don’t have a brother. But I might not know this crucial fact, and so I might in ignorance advance an impossible ought.
Yes, your prescription therefore makes no sense. I NEED to have an actual brother in order that I CAN visit him. That is what is clearly NECESSARY to move your prescription from nonsensical to coherent. It is the ONLY way your prescription makes sense, hence the example demonstrates the necessity of “can” (it’s necessary that I can visit my brother).
I’m not sure what you think adding in ignorance (of my not having a brother) would have to do in changing this scenario. You certainly don’t give any actual reasons why it would.
“But, and this is the fatal flaw in your whole argument, my ought about visiting your brother does not necessitate a can.”
Wha?
You just provided s perfect example showing the necessity of “can, ” and how a prescription becomes nonsense without “can,” and then follow that with just a bald denial of the necessity of “can”?
I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what more to say to such a non-sequitur. Perhaps you can flesh out your argument?
(Or if anyone else wants to make Steve’s point more understandable, I’m all ears)
Vaal
Suit yourself. I think this is silly. We do not make free choices but we do make choices (just as a chess program does). “You should do X” is a piece of language designed to get people to make the unfree choice that you would like them to make, rather than some other choice.
Simple.
Also, on this:
We do make unfree choices, so no problem there. On the second account – pretend I want you to date a certain girl, and you are inclined not to. I exhort you to date her. There are two possible futures (you date her, or you don’t.) Given determinism, only one of these futures is actually possible. However, at the time of my exhortation, *I don’t know which future is the real one.* So it is logical to try and tip the scales in my favor. Both futures are possible as far as probability is concerned, because I do not know which will happen. No contradiction there.
Tim: . “You should do X” is a piece of language designed to get people to make the unfree choice that you would like them to make, rather than some other choice.
Which says nothing about its coherence, which is the subject of the discussion.
Are you (and Jerry) constructing actual good reasons, good arguments when you use prescriptions??!!
A shout in your ear may be designed to move you in a certain way and even make you alter a choice , but that doesn’t make it an “argument.”
Claims like “you ought to believe the bible tells the truth because the God it describe declares Himself to be The Truth” and “God hates homosexuality, therefore homosexuality is immoral” may also be designed to get people to make choices. What bearing does that have on an argument being a sound argument? Don’t you care about making sensible prescriptions? (I’m sure you do, as does Jerry because we are always decrying theistic arguments for not making sense. Why, then, you seem so suddenly not care so much in this case, and instead only refer to physical effects instead of logical coherence, leaves me puzzled.
Regarding your dating a girl prescription: it still leaves this connection you are making between ignorance of the future and “ought” unclear.
First, in your scenario it seems your use of “ought” is entirely connected with your own desire that I date the girl. In other words, “ought” reduces to “what YOU want” and nothing more (at least, you leave no other impression). Are you really comfortable with that? I would say there are many reasons to reject such a conception of “ought,” not the least of which is that it’s pure arbitrariness means you actually give me no reason to follow your prescriptions!
But to explore your connection of knowledge with “ought” I’d ask about the following scenario: You tell Fred that he ought not rape that woman. At the point of telling Fred this, you are ignorant of what decision Fred will make.
Following this, Fred decides to rape the woman. Once Fred has raped the woman and you now know the outcome of his choice, how does this reflect on your prescription not to rape the woman???
When asked whether it was right or correct to have said Fred ought not rape the woman, does knowing the outcome somehow CHANGE the value statement? As in: “Oh, I didn’t know Fred was actually going to rape the woman, now that I see he has done so, and was determined to do so, I was wrong to say he ought not do so.”?
This would seem to be a really haywire notion of Ought that needs more justification.
Or, is it still the case that Fred ought not have raped the woman? (which is what most people we think of as morally normal would say). If so, I don’t see how knowledge of the outcome would have been in any way necessary to the
validity of your “ought” statement about rape.
Vaal
Vaal, I think I see what you’re missing here. It has to do with a “conundrum” for evolution that CS Lewis brings up in his book, Miracles.
We like to think that our rational cognitive faculties do follow logical rules. In other words, if it seems to us that this is a logical argument:
1. A
2. A -> B
3. Therefore, B
, then we want to be justified in saying it is in fact logical, and that given the premises 1. and 2, we can in fact conclude 3.
But, Lewis says, if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution, and we believe that this argument is valid simply because of our brain chemistry causing us to think it so, then how can we think that our logic is valid?
The answer, which Lewis (sadly) never arrives at, is that
1) There is good a priori reason to believe that our rational thoughts about the world are, if not perfect, good enough, since in order for them to evolve they would have had to be accurate.
2) We can use science to test our logic and do things like, say, put humans on the moon, which probably wouldn’t work if we were just deluding ourselves the whole time.
The upshot of all this is that whenever you are convinced of something by logic, this is a completely determined event. You had no choice to but see the validity of, say, the 3-step argument I wrote above, because that is the way your brain is built. So yes it is logical, but also it is deterministic.
This seems to be what you’re missing in our discussion. When a statement like “you should do X” is the conclusion of a logical argument, the statement will get you to alter a choice precisely because the argument is coherent. Arguments are not tools that we use to effect change in the absense of logical coherence, they are tools that we use to effect change via logical coherence. I believe your misunderstanding of this is the reason for your objection.
Tim, (if you are still around)…I’ll respond tonight or tomorrow. Thanks again for the discussion.
Vaal
Tim,
I do not see you have brought to light anything I had been missing. I’m familiar with Lewis’ argument and for many years I’ve have joined others in kicking the straw out of Plantinga’s version as well, but this adds nothing to the discussion.
“The upshot of all this is that whenever you are convinced of something by logic, this is a completely determined event. “
Well, of course, but that is true of every brain state, every instance of conviction. So you don’t mean to say logically valid and sound arguments necessarily result in (determined) conviction in the truth of the conclusion, do you? That would be false, given that plenty of people seem to be immune to the power of certain sound arguments against their personal beliefs, and conversely, many people are convinced by invalid or unsound arguments. So it seems to me you’ve either introduced a false claim, OR a true but trivial claim (its unenlightening to be told my convictions are determined in ANY case, via logic or otherwise, as determinism is a given in this discussion – “compatibilism” entails determinism!).
I would hope we can agree on the at least hoped for utility of sound arguments as stated something like this: When someone is being reasonable, he will (or ought to) accept the conclusions of a sound argument. With that caveat (at least from my view) in mind:
“Arguments are not tools that we use to effect change in the absense of logical coherence, they are tools that we use to effect change via logical coherence.”
Yes! Logical coherence, sound reasoning and arguments have been the object of my discussion all along . I feel like I’m the one who has had to keep bringing this to attention, so it’s bizarre to be told I would be the one missing this.
The criticism I and others keep bringing is that Jerry’s argument for why we ought to choose one attitude toward criminality over another suffers from incoherence, following as it does his previous premise that “we don’t really have choices.”
In the face of this criticism Jerry only announces that he has no choice but to have made his arguments (was determined to do so). Which of course does nothing to address whether his arguments are coherent. He also brings up the fact that his arguments may have physical influence on the brains and actions of other people. I’ve pointed out over and over why this too does nothing to address WHETHER HIS ARGUMENTS ARE SOUND, given the same points can be made about unsound arguments (they can alter behaviour in people too).
So, now that we know we are both talking about the soundess of arguments: Are Jerry’s use of prescriptions sound and coherent, given his denial of any “real choice?”. Given you have agreed concerning ought-implies-can – and I’ve elaborated on why this particular “can” entails the necessary concept of alternate choices – I don’t see any real defense for Jerry’s argument.
The only direct response I have detected in your comments thus far was to bring in our state of ignorance about the future, as if this somehow acted to justify “ought” in Jerry’s context. But I see my criticisms of this move were ignored in your reply.
Cheers,
Vaal
Vaal… your argument was invalidated.
Alright Vaal, I’ll give this one more go.
First, I ignored your scenario about rape above because you were invoking the idea of an objective morality (it seemed to me), and that idea is problematic, so I figured if we could continue this discussion without getting into that, it would be beneficial to do so.
A prescriptive statement can only be valid given a set of premises that would make it so.
“2. You should not rape that woman”
can only be valid if there is a premise before it, along the lines of
“1. You do not wish to harm innocent people.”
If 1. is true, then 2. is more or less true as well. But if you do wish to harm innocent people, or if you at least wish to harm this innocent person, then the statement “You should not rape that woman” is no longer true.
Now, take Jerry’s statement
2. You should change the way you treat criminals.
This statement is reasonably based on a prior premise, along the lines of
1. You wish to treat criminals in whatever way will be best for them and best for society as a whole.
If 1. is true, and given that there is no personal or societal benefit to retributive punishment, then 2. follows logically, since we do currently employ something akin to retributive punishment. At the very least, you can say that we are too focused on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation and prevention.
If someone disagrees with premise 1, then a case for it can be made. But if 1. is true, then 2. logically follows.
If you still disagree – I will ask again – please use a step-by-step form as I have above to show me where the contradiction lies.
Tim,
Regarding your brief account of prescriptive statements, I actually agree on the necessity of desires to prescriptions, though if I get out my quibbles with your account, it would be a whole other discussion. So, basically, yes I agree on how prescriptive statements are justified or made “true” in relation to a desire. And that is just the point! This means that the “truth” of a prescriptive statement is not, as you earlier depicted, derived from our ignorance of outcomes!
In trying to make “ought” work given Jerry’s “we have no real choice” premise, I find you are shifting around, without cohesion.
Your first account of using “ought” in Jerry’s context suffured two problems: 1. an unjustified appeal to the ignorance of future choices, and 2. it was connected to YOUR desire, not mine. You stated I had no desire to date the woman but that you were going to tell me I OUGHT to date the woman. But here you are instead saying “ought” only make sense given a desire-related premise one already holds. Well, if I did not desire to date the woman, then it would have been nonsensical for you to tell me I OUGHT to date the woman.
Your account didn’t appeal to any desire of mine – it only referenced YOUR desire that I date the woman. But on your new account of “ought,” that surely doesn’t translate to what I ought to do. So it seems your first account of using “ought” is made nonsense of your current account of “ought.”
But we still have the problem of how ignorance of the future is also supposed to underwrite and justify “ought” – a point you and Steve have emphasized, as in “yes in fact only one coarse of action is possible, but SINCE WE DON’T KNOW which one will be chosen, our use of “ought” is reasonable. This appeal to our ignorance of an outcome as somehow necessary to using “ought” is what I’ve been asking you to justify. Yet your current account doesn’t seem to support this at all.
Look what you have now said about the logic of “ought”:
Tim: ““2. You should not rape that woman”
can only be valid if there is a premise before it, along the lines of“1. You do not wish to harm innocent people.” If 1. is true, then 2. is more or less true as well.
Right. We have an “IF/THEN logic: IF you do not wish to harm innocent people THEN you ought not rape that woman.” (The first premise being what underwrites the “ought.”) So…how does “not knowing what choice someone is going to make” CHANGE the logic?
If I say “you ought not rape that woman” then presumably this was prescribed BASED on the premise that you do not want to hurt innocent people. We don’t, therefore, have to know whether you end up raping a woman or not – it’s already justified, already “true” that you “ought not rape that woman” following from that first premise! Which makes your appeal to our “not knowing what we’ll choose to do” simply beside the point as I keep pointing out. (And hence, it doesn’t serve to defend how Jerry could be using “ought”).
The exact same goes for your example of how the truth of how we “ought” to change our way of treating criminals will have to be based on a starting premise to make sense (“IF/THEN conjunction). It makes the ought statement justified and true whether know which choice is eventually made or not. Hence all your (and Steve’s) appeals to our ignorance of the future in justifying “ought” are superfluous, as I keep saying. (And do not act, therefore, as a type of justification for explaining away Jerry’s contradiction problem, which combines “You can not make real choice” with “You ought to choose to do X…” – which is made nonsense if you agree with ought-implies-can).
Cheers,
Vaal
Vaal,
It is really simple.
Ought does not necessitate can. Certainly it would be nonsensical to insist someone ought to do something that you know is impossible for them to do, (Like visit a non-existent brother.) But if you don’t know that a thing is impossible, then you can’t be charged with being nonsensical for saying that that thing should be done. Implying something is not the same as necessitating something. In order for your argument to be valid, ought needs to necessitate can, not merely imply can.
Alright Vaal, I’m done. I laid out Jerry’s logic in simple step-by-step fashion for you (re-pasted below), and you still have not pointed out where there is any contradiction.
1. You wish to treat criminals in whatever way will be best for them and best for society as a whole.
2. You should change the way you treat criminals (because you do not currently treat them this way).
Simple.
Steve,
Ought does not necessitate can.
You haven’t said what “ought” means in the context of Determinism and a lack of “real choice” (as Jerry expresses it). Once I asked Tim this question, his answer showed that all this appeal to “not knowing the outcome” is beside the point.
Certainly it would be nonsensical to insist someone ought to do something that you know is impossible for them to do
But that IS what you (and Jerry) are doing. You don’t have to know the specific outcome of an action before-hand to already have made this contradiction.
As I’ve argued, the “can” in ought-implies-can depends on acknowledging the ability to “do otherwise,” that is to acknowledge CHOICE between alternative actions. (That’s why saying “you OUGHT to obey gravity” is silly – simply being able to do something isn’t enough to render an “ought” statement sensical – being able to do EITHER A or B makes the ought statement make sense.
So if you start out by saying “you can not do either A or B, because one of those choices is pre-determined,” which is the premise you and Jerry are starting with, then it makes no sense to
say “You OUGHT to do A” because you have already concluded that a choice between A and B is IMPOSSIBLE.
So it doesn’t matter whether you know whether someone will choose A or B – you have already ruled out the idea that such a choice is impossible!
Ought necessitates acknowledging that one CAN choose between A and B. If you have previously ruled out that one CAN actually choose between A and B, then you have made your “ought” prescription nonsensical before we even have to know the outcome of any choice.
Dunno how much more clearly I can put it.
Vaal
No, that is not what we are doing, because we don’t know that it is impossible at the time we are saying the ought.
Ought does not necessitate can. Only if ought necessitated can would you have a case that Jerry is being inconsistent.
Tim
I know we all have to end these conversations at some point. No problem if you don’t wish to respond any more. Since you posted, I’ll just respond:
I have indeed picked through everything you’ve written and, I think, shown the problems involved. I’ve taken apart concepts of “ought” and “can” and pointed as many arrows directly at the incoherency and contradictions, given Jerry’s position. What more can a guy do?
I also have shown more than once how the appeals you have made to ignorance of outcomes do nothing to underwrite the use of “ought,” and even your more recent posts support this.
As to this:
1. You wish to treat criminals in whatever way will be best for them and best for society as a whole. 2. You should change the way you treat criminals (because you do not currently treat them this way).
Note, yet again, that knowing the choice or outcome is unnecessary for the use of “ought” as you now present it. Which, again, makes all your previous appeals to our lack of knowing the future outcomes seemingly not pertinent.
The problem, yet again:
Jerry tells us that choices are an illusion, and in fact we “have no choices” in our behaviour (he has said so explicitly). Your recommendation above only makes sense IF WE HAVE A CHOICE.
Simple.
You’ve tried to show there is no contradiction by saying “but we CAN change our behaviour toward criminals.” I’ve pointed out that is inadequate because to make sense of making a”choice” or of an “ought” statement, we have to acknowledge not only that we COULD DO X but also that we COULD CHOOSE NOT TO DO X. So “ought” statements always, to make sense, necessitate the premise that “We can choose to do A or we can CHOOSE NOT to do A.”
But Jerry starts with the premise that it is false that we can choose to do something OR NOT. He says that one outcome is already pre-determined, and thus he denies we have any “real choice” – so he always STARTS by denying that we actually have a choice to do EITHER A or NOT do A.
So we have Jerry saying “It is impossible for you to choose either A or B, as you are already determined to choose one of them.” He follows this with a prescription “You ought to do B…” and prescriptions assume which assumes exactly what he has denied, that you can do A OR B (or not do A).” Therefore he is in contradiction in using “should” and “ought” right out of the gate…whether we know what anyone chooses to do or not.
I guess I’m done too because I can’t come up with any other plain ways to point this out.
As I and others have argued, I think there is a way to speak of choice and prescriptions in a fully deterministic world. The thing is, once you start doing so coherently…you start talking that language of compatibilism, which Jerry wants to reject.
Vaal
I stated several comments ago that we do make unfree choices. You had no problem with it then. But now you bring it up again, and your entire argument seems to hinge on the contradiction in telling people who cannot choose to make a choice. But it’s already been said – we make unfree choices. Jerry’s been stubborn about his word choice lately, but he wouldn’t deny that we choose between alternate possibilities just like any chess program does. If you don’t know that much about his position, you haven’t been paying attention.
Joshua,
You are in error. Jerry’s exhorting does have sense; it provided additional environmental input into your matrix of causal determinants. In this post you reveal a conflating of the idea that you don’t have contra-causal free will, with the notion that you are un-effected by new environmental inputs.
@Joshua: “If we don’t have free will, then there is no sense in your exhorting us to do anything (we don’t have a choice in the matter of whether or not we punish criminals).”
Of course, this also means Jerry cannot choose not to exhort us. Poor fellow.
Sorry, but I don’t need the sympathy. Indeed, I have no choice about whom I exhort or what I exhort about. Do you think otherwise? But that doesn’t mean that the exhortations don’t have a chance of working. Of course they do: they constitute environmental stimuli that affect people’s brains and possibly their actions.
I was just being cheeky, Jerry. I humbly withdraw my sympathy.
No, I do not think otherwise. I agree that exhortations make a difference, just like rain makes a difference in whether my garden will grow.
I just don’t know in what way that is relevant to free will.
Sorry, but I don’t get how the opposite of dualism is determinism. Determinism allows just as much a “ghost in the machine” position as dualism.
Kenneth Miller uses a deterministic argument as the method by which his god rigged the rules of evolution to give the Earth humans. God gave the rules a “nudge”, ergo humans with souls who “fell” and needed a “savior”. Deterministically. No choice.
But Miller is wrong. We live in a probabilistic biosphere. Roll the dice and you can and most likely will get a different result. How does this justify determinism?
In particular, the Lenski experiments refute any deterministic notion of biology. Only one of the lines evolved to use citrate, and only after an “accidental” mutation. That’s not determinism. Determinism would have left the bacteria with no other route but the one that led to use of citrate. All the lines would have developed in a deterministic manner, gaining the same mutations at the same rate and arriving at the same result at the same time. They didn’t. Not deterministic. Case closed.
Frankly, a deterministic biosphere would lead us with just one species. Or maybe a symbiont — forever eating each other.
And really, continuing to conflate “consciousness” with “brain/mind” is just plain silly. The brain operates on several “levels”. The autonomic level keeps the heart beating without need to think about it.
The subconscious level is where memories are stored and where deep decisions are made. You don’t walk around with the name of your fifth grade teacher forever in your consciousness — but it’s there (mine was Mrs. Hall). And there’s no need to put all your conscious attention on a problem in order to solve it. In fact, it’s sometimes best to set a problem “aside” from the consciousness.
The conscious level is where memories are retrieved and where awareness of subconscious decisions are reviewed and evaluated…and sometimes CHANGED. AKA, free will. I CAN decide to not rob that bank. I CAN decide to not have that cupcake. I CAN decide to walk the dog more often. And on and on. Within the constraints of our physical environment, of course — I can’t decide the dog and I should fly today instead of walk.
But just because there are some physical constraints on our behavior, that does not mean we aren’t in control of our possible behaviors.
Both here and at Choice in Dying, you seem to be conflating “Scientists can’t predict the outcome” with “The outcome is probabalistic.” Maxwell’s Demon would have known what Lenski’s bacteria were going to do, presuming quantum indeterminacy didn’t have an effect.
If you think reality isn’t deterministic above the quantum level, then why aren’t equations such as this (F=ma) wrong?
Not all of those bacteria developed the mutation because not all were identical and not all were exposed to the same environment.
I don’t think one bacterium in one situation having a particular mutation while another bacterium in another situation doesn’t disproves determinism.
I’ve thought about this until my head spins, and keep returning to the dictionary definition of my favorite cynic, Ambrose Bierce:
MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. From the Latin mens, a fact unknown to that honest shoe-seller, who, observing that his learned competitor over the way had displayed the motto “Mens conscia recti,” emblazoned his own front with the words “Men’s, women’s and children’s conscia recti.”
Here’s a scenario: suppose you had convinced everyone in the world there is no dualistic free-will. And suppose you and a committee of determinists had re-written the criminal justice system exactly to your liking, and re-written the English language exactly to your liking.
You would (correct me if I’m wrong) still distinguish between: (1) a bank employee who took money from his bank against the rules because he had large gambling debts, or simply because he was greedy; and (2) a bank employee who took money from his bank because a robber was holding a gun to his head or had kidnapped his children and was threatening to kill them.
In whatever justice system you had put in place in your no-free-will utopia you would still distinguish between those two (wouldn’t you?) and you would treat the bank employee very differently in the two situations and apply very different sanctions.
In other words, you would make a distinction over the moral responsibility in the two cases. Now, you might not call it “moral responsbility”, having re-written the English language to remove any semblence of dualism or woo, you might call it something else.
But the point is that, whatever you now call it, it would be effectively equivalent to what everyone now calls “moral responsibility”. In other words you’d have arrived at a “moral-responsibility-equivalent” that is NOT dependent on “true” dualistic choice, you’d have become a de facto compatibilist!
And at that point you’d realise what the compatibilists had been going on about all the time, which is not a hankering after dualistic free-will, but simply a thinking through of how things are in our deterministic world.
Of course I’d distinguish these two situations; for even though both are deterministic, there’s a real difference in the effects on society of punishing the bank employee in the two cases.
And no, I don’t call that moral responsibility, and so what if other people call it that? Moral responsibility implies choice, and there is no choice in either case. It’s those who float the idea of “moral responsibility” that are confusing things, not I!
And really, to imply that I haven’t thought through the consequences of my stand doesn’t give me any credit. The reasons for differential punishment are perfectly clear in my head, and always have been.
And no, your example doesn’t make me realize what compatibilists are going on about. You can couch this whole scenario in terms of determinism and the effects of punishment on our society, without bringing up the words “free will” or “moral responsibility” at all. So I don’t see the point of compatibilism, which is to reconcile determinism with free will. There is no “free will” here though there is a difference in circumstances (remember that in principle a bank employee could decide to get shot instead of hand over the bucks). So what is compatible with what here?
I see plenty of reasons to punish people differentially based on circumstances, and those involve differential effects on the criminal, on the onlookers, and on society as a whole. We don’t need any notion of moral responsibility or “free will” to do that. “Moral responsibility” is a loaded term, implying dualism and even God, and should be discarded.
Yes, you could. But whatever phrases you used instead of “moral responsibility” would be functionally equivalent. They might not have the same connotations of dualism and woo, but the pragmatic effect (jail terms etc) would be the same.
The point of compatibilism is really just to use the words that are currently in the English language, rather than inventing a whole set of new ones. Compatibilism is thus not pining after dualistic free-will, nor trying to rescue a quasi-dualistic free-will, it is just re-interpreting our existing words to fit a deterministic stance.
And the difference between you and the compatibilists really is just semantics. (That is what is slightly frustrating about this whole long-running debate!) On thse threads most of us are agreed on the substance of the issues (we could all likely agree on the jail terms in the above cases) we’re just arguing over the words used.
Well ok, if you consider that it has those connotations then I can see why you dislike it. To me it doesn’t have those connotations, so I don’t see a problem with it. I just see it as entirely equivalent to whatever you’d prefer to use in its stead. (Perhaps there is a US/UK difference on that, with the UK being much less religious so much less likely to read religion into such words.)
The term “moral responsibility” has, I think, a definite connotation that those who are morally responsible *deserve* punishment; that is, they should be punished whether or not it brings about any good consequences such as deterrence, rehabilitation, public safety, restitution, etc. So, the question is whether a purely consequentialist criminal justice system would look different from one based on moral responsibility as defined above.
Some philosophers and psychologists such as Joshua Greene (“For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything”) Derk Pereboom (Living Without Free Will), Bruce Waller (Against Moral Responsibility) and Karl Menninger (The Crime of Punishment) have argued that it does look different, in that it becomes non-retributive: inflicting supposedly deserved suffering and deprivation on offenders isn’t any longer the main objective of a criminal justice system. The suffering of offenders becomes a last resort option, not obligatory, when seeking to produce a safer, less punitive and violent culture, which is what the objective of criminal justice becomes when we drop retribution, http://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm
I’m less familiar with discourse in the US, but in the UK “deserved suffering and deprivation on offenders” has long ceased to be the “main objective” of the justice system. Nowadays public discussion of this is mostly about deterrence, protecting the public, and rehabilitation.
Only a few fringe members of the “hang ’em and flog ’em brigade” (widely derided by the mainstream) would nowadays emphasize the retributive suffering.
Nice to hear, wish the same were true in the US.
‘I see plenty of reasons to punish people differentially based on circumstances, and those involve differential effects on the criminal, on the onlookers, and on society as a whole.’
Then why not make punishments as draconian as possible, in order to induce as many desirable chemical changes in the brains that make up the onlookers (public disembowellings, burnings?) and society as a whole (television!)?
‘as many desirable chemical changes as possible’…
I am sorry, but that talk about ‘non-retributive’ justice, unless qualified, sounds like mere cant; I am reminded of those mealy-mouthed, and often sadistic, masters who before beating you at school would say, ‘I’m doing this for your own good, Harris’ or ‘I’m sorry, Harris, but an example has to made of you.’
You’re not serious about disembowelling people for parking tickets, are you? Do you realize what kind of society that would lead to? Some poor sap would be tortured for an offense that is trivial. And everyone would feel they lived in a police state. Human lives are worth something, right?
Well, I was thinking of disembowelling and burning for things a bit more serious than parking tickets… but now I think of it I live in Tokyo, and…
All I should like to see is the assumption that ‘non-retributive justice’ is necessarily more lenient than ‘retributive justice’ addressed. I agree that it should be more lenient, but I can certainly imagine some dystopian future in which well-meaning guardians of humanity institutionalise people for life, or perhaps put them down or muck about with their brains on the grounds that they have psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies – ‘We’re dreadfully sorry, Mr and Mrs Smith, but little Tommy’s got be put down before he harms anybody…’; many eugenicists were well-meaning, as were many lobotomizers – Robert Lowell has a harrowing poem on the lobotomizing of a prisoner, and there was
that New Zealand woman writer, quite a good one, whose name I forget, who was saved from a pending lobotomy because a short story of hers won an important literary prize (Jane Campion made a rather good film about her). Jon Ronson has written a thought-provoking, funny and disturbing book called ‘The Psychopath Test’ that is very much worth reading.
Ergo free will.
Don’t put words into my mouth, Steve, whatever the small satisfaction you get from it.
I did no such thing as to put a single word into your mouth.
This is in response to Steve’s response that he was not putting words into my mouth; I say this, because I am not sure whether my response will end up in the right place, since the thread is so complicated:
If, Steve, you really are incapable of understanding things unless they are couched in a very literal way, I shall reword what I said previously and say this: Have the courtesy not to attribute to me thoughts that I do not have or positions I do not hold. It is not honest.
Tim
You sir would impugn my voracity?
My objective was not to attribute to you any thoughts that you do not have. (What gain could there ever be to do so in a conversation?) Instead, I was summarizing what I had come to understand your position to be, based upon the case you seemed to be advancing. (In retrospect I see that I could have made that clear had I added the rhetorical cue “Is that what you mean, Tim?” after saying many eugenicists were well-meaning, as were many lobotomizers – Ergo free will.)
If you were not trying to argue for free willism, then I honestly misinterpreted you.
You were doing well until you came to this,
.
You have nothing to support this claim.
For pragmatic reasons alone, one could see that if one desires to affect future behavior there is a distinct difference between the two cases, that call for two different responses, having nothing to do with moral judgments.
But take note of other sentences in my post: “… you might not call it “moral responsibility” … but … it would be effectively equivalent to what everyone now calls “moral responsibility”.”
If you are making different responses on account of the different “X” (or whatever you want to call it), then that “X” is functionally equivalent to “moral responsibility”. Again, we’re merely arguing semantics.
my question about free will discussion is:
why do we engage in this seemingly all resolved and clear cut case of determinism and no dualistic free will while we could spend the precial time and mental energy pondering more practical matters?
i know everybody is “free” to do what they like and therefore i am not the one to suggesst what others whould do or think
or am i mistaken and we are not free at all?
is there some trajectory of human evolution at an organism-whole level and by extension on the level of the individual thinking as well?
would it be in our interest as individuals and organism -whole to spend our mental energies on thinking about this larger picture and where the whole thing is going more and less on seeemingly resolved issues of semantics?
42.
Spoken like a computer.
Thank you!
It mystifies me that free will is something the people refuse to reject. If they think that people are able to deliberate over their actions then were else other than the brain do they think deliberation comes from?
So… I’m not my brain? The brain does the deliberation and I merely think it’s me? How is that not dualism?
Let’s see if we can find a minimal set of things that we all (here, if not in the wider world) agree with. This should make it easier to focus on the precise disagreements.
1. Dualist free will is false. There is no evidence at all for any ghost in the machine.
2. The “mind” is basically the brain and nervous system etc, and these are all part of the physical world, obeying all the usual laws of physics etc.
3. Some decisions are made after conscious thought.
4. Some decisions are made subconsciously, or involve a strong subconscious element.
5. There are several definitions of free will, and if we don’t define exactly what we mean by it then anything we say about it will be pretty much useless until we have defined it.
Anything else?
Good try TJR.
#3. Not so… it may be the case that conscious thought is not a active “choice making thing” as we may feel it to be. It seems as if evidence is point out that consciousness may only be a “display only” of choices that were made subconsciously.
#5. Libertarian Free Will is a concept that is so incoherent that proponents of it can’t even write a clear and concise definition of it. (Sort of like the problem with god.) Just as atheist can only say, so far nothing that has been put forth as god has proven to actually exist. The non-free willists likewise has to say, anything so far put forth as free will has turned out to be nothing more than an illusion.
With respect to #3, it only says that decisions are made after conscious thought. It doesn’t claim that conscious thought is solely or even partly causally responsible for that decision. I don’t see how someone can dispute the claim that sometimes there is conscious thought temporally followed by a decision.
With respect to #5, I would think that it is ruled out by #1, so I don’t know why you are considering it in #5.
Maybe #3 could be restated more clearly as
3. Some decisions involve at least some element of conscious thought.
But we don’t really know that either.
By “involve” do you mean “causally involve” as in the conscious thought is part of the causal history of the decision? It’s important to be terminologically clear about these things.
I really liked the “display only” term as it makes some sense to me. Thanks.
Maybe what we call “consciousness” could be just a ‘sixth’ sense (if I may borrow this term).
As opposite to the other five senses, which helps our brain construct an image of the outer world, maybe the consciousness sense helps our brain somehow construct an image of itself, its inner workings.
A sense to try to construct an image of itself.
Through our eyes our brain can ‘see’ an object but cannot alter the object being seen. Nonetheless this fact unintentionally alters the brain;
Maybe, in the same way, through our “consciousness” our brain can ‘see’ some of the choices that are being made by itself, but the “consciousness” cannot alter the object being seen, in this case the brain itself. Nonetheless, just like when our eyes see something, this fact may also unintentionally alters the brain, indirectly, in a non-linear kind of way…
Which, anyway, would not leave room for free will…
Quibble: the phrase punishing severe violations of the social order has more salutary consequences seems to imply that an ordering relationship over a set of alternatives exists — and thus, “choices” of alternatives exists.
The question would seem to be rather what sense that such choices are “free”.
I do wish that you would at least use the term “determinism” correctly. It does not mean the same thing as “naturalism” or “non-dualism”. Determinism vs. Indeterminism is basically irrelevant to the problem of free will, but by continuing to use it, you are muddying the waters.
The following article is a basic introduction.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
For a more thorough treatment, you can refer to John Earman’s “A Primer on Determinism”.
Good point!
I’m perplexed how Jerry Coyne could have recommended Sam Harris’ book “Free Will” – It was so muddled, with contradictions, lousy assumptions and appeals to intuition. Coyne must have noticed the unscientific mindset that plagued his book! I’ve expanded my thoughts here:
http://www.samharris.org/forum/viewthread/16542/
Good review.
While reading this, I was suddenly seized (against my will, of course) to play Oingo Boingo “Only A Lad”. A fitting piece, I think.
Can a mindless robot be sane or insane?
It almost sounds like you’re supposing that *how* our mind reaches conclusions is somehow relevant, but Coyne has told us that such claims are merely a sophistical attempt to smuggle in dualism.
WordPress login put this in the wrong place. It’s a reply to an above comment. (So feel free to delete.)
The relevant point is merely that as human beings we care a good deal about *how* we reach certain decisions and acting on them. This is central to our notion of freedom (as compatibilists make clear).
Sanity is a notion that is intimately related to freedom. We do not hold insane people responsible for their actions, but we do hold sane people responsible — even though those actions are (effectively) determined at the physical level.
Yes indeed, sanity is intimately related to freedom. Hope my point is getting through.
If determinism – in the sense that Coyne and lots of others understand it – is true, then all their and their opponents’ thinking and reasoning is predetermined to be as it is. How then can any of them tell whether their thinking is correct or incorrect? They just think what they are predetermined to think, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve not seen any of them address this issue.
In other words, IF determinism is true then there’s no way to show that it’s true – which doesn’t show that it’s false, just that there’s no way of knowing that it’s true.
But Frank, how would free will being true avoid this same issue? How does libertarian free will result knowing truth?
I freely choose what to believe is true = truth, as opposed to, I believe to be true that which I am convicted to believe as true truth?
Now you’ve seen someone address this issue. twice.
Who was the first ape decedent to come up with this line of thinking?
Why would that follow? If determinism is the case, and I come to believe that it is true by epistemically reliable processes, then why wouldn’t I know that determinism is true. I see no more reason to be an incompatibilist about knowledge than I do to be an incompatibilist about free will.
Do you think that I need to be able to believe otherwise in order to have knowledge? If so, why?
Steve, Bernard again (posted this way to avoid the ever-narrower reply boxes).
Neither I nor Popper said, suggested, or implied that beliefs and arguments cannot be parts of a deterministic universe. They definitely could be and if determinism is true, they are – but if so, they have been completely predetermined ultimately by conditions present way before we were born. “The viable alternative”: to show that an answer is wrong, one needn’t be able to supply a right answer, desirable as that might be. But for my favorite alternative, Popper again: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/popper/natural_selection_and_the_emergence_of_mind.html
It’s very lengthy – his alternative is in the 4th and final part.
“Where’s the argument?” I find it pretty clear – Popper omits just one point that hardly needed stating: that we aren’t deceiving ourselves when we argue. But one way of spelling it out:
1)If (A)determinism is true, then (B) all our reasoning is predetermined to be what it is by conditions within our brains (ourselves), regardless of whether our reasoning is correct or incorrect.
2)If (B) then (C): our reasoning whether correct or incorrect is what it is merely because it happens to be predetermined to be what it is.
3)(C) is so contrary to our experience and awareness of ourselves that we must judge (C) to be false.
4)Therefore by modus tollens (B) is false, and hence by modus tollens (A) is false.
An illustration (NOT an argument!) for clarification: suppose a computer that due to some hardware or software flaws sometimes calculates correctly and sometimes incorrectly. Could it check its own calculations to ascertain which ones are correct or not? Well, no – it just does what it is programmed (predetermined) to do and cannot check on the correctness of its own calculations. That’s the circumstances we are in if determinism is true.
My argument IS deductively valid (unless I am predetermined to think that it is when it isn’t!) but there’s the matter of whether the premises are true. As a fallibilist, I’m not completely sure they are, so I await contrary considerations.
“In other words, IF determinism is true then there’s no way to show that it’s true – which doesn’t show that it’s false, just that there’s no way of knowing that it’s true.”
This is simply a very old philosophical problem restated. We use science to check what our senses tell us. But all of our science is built on information we originally got from our senses. So how can we be sure the information our senses gives us is veridical?
We can’t. We can’t be absolutely 100% sure of anything (yes, even this sentence). This is not news. But all of the data we’ve acquired through our senses, and through rational thought, and through science comports very nicely. It certainly seems like we’ve put people on the moon, whether or not we actually have. Given how nicely all the data fits together, you have to suppose that either 1) reality is more or less as we think it is, or 2) the whole damn thing is an illusion, and we are hopelessly wrong about everything. Perhaps we’re living in the matrix.
If 1 is true, then there’s nothing to worry about. If 2 is true, we would never know it (as you say), and there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do about it, so we might as well carry on with our lives, since, you know, living what I subjectively experience as a happy, free life makes me subjectively happier than not doing so. Even if this is an illusion, I aim to make it a happy one.
Steve, Bernard, et al:
As you correctly see, I don’t think determinism is true, although I admit that lots (I don’t claim to know just how much) of what we think and do is hugely influenced by antecedent conditions. I don’t simplistically claim that what I freely choose to believe = truth – I’m sure I believe a lot of falsehoods (if only I knew which beliefs those are!). Nor do I think that IF determinism is true then all our beliefs are false; we could be predetermined to believe lots of true things as well as lots of false things – but we would have no reliable way to tell which is which. Believing what is true does not equal knowledge. That is, Bernard, IF determinism is true then there aren’t any epistemically reliable processes. I don’t know who the first ape descendent to come up with this approach was, but some have been around for a while, at least since William James: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/james/
“Do you think that I need to be able to believe otherwise in order to have knowledge? If so, why?”
No, it’s that reality needs to BE otherwise in order to have knowledge. Why? Because if determinism is true then both you and those who disagree with you do so merely due to being predetermined ultimately by conditions present before they were born to believe as they do, and neither believes what they believe for good epistemic reasons – although they may be predetermined to think that they do.
Also, I find the evidence for determinism to be pretty weak, as Tallis’s “Aping Mankind” spells out. Unfortunately he often lapses into hyperbole and bombast, which prevents readers from attending to the details of his arguments.
Why does “neither believes what they believe for good epistemic reasons” follow from determinism? That’s a complete non sequitur. What is your justification for that claim?
I doubt I can improve on Karl Popper:
“For according to determinism, any theories-such as, say, determinism-are held because of a certain physical structure of the holder (perhaps of his brain). Accordingly we are deceiving ourselves (and are physically so determined as to deceive ourselves) whenever we believe that there are such things as arguments or reasons which make us accept determinism.
Or in other words, physical determinism is a theory which, if it is true, is not arguable, since it must explain all our reactions, including what appear to us as beliefs based on arguments, as due to purely physical conditions. Purely physical conditions, including our physical environment, make us say or accept whatever we say or accept; and a well-trained physicist who does not know any`French, and who has never heard of determinism, would be able to predict what a French determinist would say in a French discussion on determinism; and of course also what his indeterminist opponent would say. But this means that if we believe that we have accepted a theory like determinism because we were swayed by the logical force of certain arguments, then we are deceiving ourselves, according to physical determinism; or more precisely, we are in a physical condition which determines us to deceive ourselves.”
http://www.the-rathouse.com/2011/Clouds-and-Clocks.html
Popper simply stated the non sequitur, just as you did. So… where is the argument? Why can’t beliefs and arguments be part of a deterministic universe? Sometimes I can’t believe the poor level of argumentation in discussions of questions like this.
Honestly, the phenomena of the “shiny thing” popped into my mind.
What I am waiting to hear/read is the viable alternative to “everyone believes what they believe only because they are caused to believe so” argument.
Surely it can’t be “everyone believes what they believe because they contra-causally freely choose to believe so”. i.e., non-free willists believe in non-free will only because they free choose to.
Someday you might…
“Sure, we can mull over things more than, say, a slug, but so what? Our form of ‘mulling over things’ is merely a more sophisticated version of what a slug does when it surveys its environment, and there’s no qualitative difference in either the determinism or in the way the nerves and ganglia work. Pray where, oh where, is all that vaunted ‘freedom’?”
There are crucial kinds of freedom and autonomy which are compatible with determinism, for instance being uncoerced in making choices, acting on one’s own desires instead of at someone’s behest, and being free from disease, poverty, political oppression, etc. If we are lucky, we get to enjoy such freedoms; slugs don’t.
Determinism makes us unfree and renders choice-making illusory only if one defines *real*, *true* freedom, autonomy, control, choice, etc. as requiring freedom from causality, which is what Jerry does. But that definition isn’t a naturalistic possibility, so anyone using it to claim we aren’t really free and autonomous hasn’t made the full transition to naturalism. Jerry and Sam Harris (in his book on free will) are apparently still in transition.
http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm
Tom, you’ve let me down.
How are slugs coerced in making their choices?
How is it that we can say slugs are not acting on their own desires?
And what evidence is there that slugs are ravaged by disease, poverty and political oppression?
I think you took the wrong tack with this one.
Why do you assume that slugs do not have some degree of free will?
Pretty much for the same reason that slugs don’t have any square circles in their universe.
Ok, I grant slugs all the freedoms we have. But are they enjoying them? 🙂
On empirical investigations of what the folk believe about free will:
Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe conducted a study where they described a universe in which every decision was completely caused by prior physical conditions. They then asked some study participants an abstract question about whether people could be fully morally responsible in this universe. 86% of the participants said they couldn’t. Other study participants were asked about a concrete situation in the same universe, with a story about a particular person (Bill) killing his family. When asked about whether Bill is fully morally responsible for this act, only 28% said he wasn’t. So big difference in how people think about the abstract and concrete question.
What to make of this, I don’t know.
Pirate,
I can only suggest what I make of it: people have a hard time coming to grips with the reality that their is no such thing as free will.
In the first case 14% of the participants failed to grasp correctly the implications of the scenario put before them.
When the emotionalism of a man killing his family was added in the 2nd hypothetical this 14% jumps to 72% not grasping the implications of the stated given “a universe in which every decision was completely caused by prior physical conditions”.
Or maybe people simply have compatibilist intuitions in concrete situations. I for one have never accepted this idea that compatibilism is a redefinition of free will. Who decided that the dualists owned the term “free will”?
Ha ha very funny BO.
What was the wording of the abstract question?
What was the wording of the concrete question?
This may explain the difference.
How can it be possible to fail to appreciate that there is a valid meaning of “freedom”? I’m truly perplexed. Of course we don’t have freedom from causation. But who disputes that? (Ok maybe some people outside this board do dispute that. But if you’re arguing against that kind of freedom, then you’re not reaching your target audience).
Is it so hard to imagine the ways in which you, as an evolved living agent with motives primarily tuned toward survival and procreation, can be curtailed, prevented, frustrated of your goals? When you are put in a cage, when you are starved, when you are neutered, doesn’t that limit, even stop your ability to act according to your aims? What is such a situation if not lack of freedom? What word shall we use for the concept of agency without consequential contraints?
Those who say that the ability to choose pancakes for breakfast tomorrow is not an example of free will, should be locked up and not given food and water until lunch! 🙂
DV,
To be clear, you are addressing the so-called compatibilists in this post?
Steve, I thought it was clear I’m addressing those who think there is no such thing as free will. Like Joni Mitchell says “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
Jerry you are right about Mele’s conclusion on Soon’s data.
For starters, the patients pushed both left and right buttons equally often and they were conscious of the decision to press within a time interval of one second before actually pressing a button. This is important in understanding the significance of Soon’s data. The patients were not aware until one second before they pushed the button which button they were going to push.
The spectacular part is that there was precursor brain activity in other areas of brain prior to the motor region activity examined by Libet. This precursor activity occurred much earlier and allowed Soon’s team to predict which button was going to be pressed. Libet got 350 milliseconds lead time now it is 10 seconds lead time! The two main criticism of Libet–timing issues because the measurement was so small and the precursor activity was nonspecific preparatory activity–were resolved by the Soon study. How? The brain activity occurs much earlier and in different areas of the brain then Libet had shown and the precursor activity allowed Soon to predict the outcome.
Also, the predictions were not perfect, as Mele noted, but they were correct 60 percent of the time which is better than chance. Additionally, the absence of 100% accuracy is probably due to the lack of precision of the detecting apparatus and inadequacies of the pattern-recognition software.
What does all this mean? It appears you are not aware you are making a decision until the decision has already been made.
Libertarian free will is dead. And Soon killed it.
“What does all this mean? It appears you are not aware you are making a decision until the decision has already been made.” A decision about pushing buttons . . . maybe. But decisions about refinancing a mortgage, or choosing a career, et al.? To generalize from button-pushing to such major decisions is complete foolishness.
“To generalize from button-pushing to such major decisions is complete foolishness.”
How is that foolishness? Are you suggesting that there are decisions that we are fully aware we are making from the outset and other decisions that we are not fully aware we are making from the outset?
Yes!
But until there are neurological studies of such major decisions (which involve dozens of smaller intermediate choices), showing clearly that each step along the way was chosen before the choser was aware of the choice – and not for just a few people, but for a stratified random sample large enough to have a p-value of less than .05 (and preferably .01) for a population of millions, I’m gonna be skeptical that important decisions are usually made before people are aware of making them.
You are saying we have free will because we don’t know enough, yet. I am saying we don’t have free will because everything we, currently, know about the brain and the laws of nature suggest we don’t have free will. At least, not libertarian free will.
Perhaps, free will exists as a veto mechanism of subconscious decisions or resides in the mental kinetics of more complicated decisions. However, this is implausible considering our current understanding of the brain.
Your viewpoint is fine, but you can’t assert that free will exists or doesn’t exist. At best you, by your qualifications, must remain indifferent about the question of free will until science can, conclusive, prove free will does or does not exist.
Persto, not too bad a summary of my view – but a little tweaking: putting aside the hairy problem of explaining exactly what “freewill” means, I don’t know but I strongly suspect that we do have it, and indeed I think we don’t know enough yet. And perhaps I have a higher standard for knowledge than you do and thus disagree with your “everything we currently know” claim. Eg. fMRI scans – they don’t measure neuronal activity, they measure blood flow which is assumed (maybe with good reason)to correlate with neuronal activity. In fMRIs the whole brain lights up, blood flows everywhere in the brain, but in some areas much more than others. fMRIs measure blood flow in little cubes of brain tissue, each of which contains thousands of neurons. What is each of those neurons doing, what and how is it communicating with hundreds or thousands of other neurons? No one knows because they are so tiny that neuroscience can’t spell that out yet – if ever. And why think that where maximal activity is, is where some behavior is being “controlled”? Maybe where there is little activity is controlling the maximal activity, as when driving down an Interstate a teeny action (a touch on the accelerator or brake) controls the major action that is in the engine. Neuroscience just doesn’t know specific details about how millions of neurons interact, which is why I’m skeptical of your “everthing we know” claim. I’m more impressed by everything we don’t know!
I am talking about libertarian free will.
I can’t dispute the infancy of neuroscience.
However, the infancy of neuroscience is not a defense of free will.
Can you explain how neuronal activity doesn’t correlate with blood flow?
Can you explain how Soon’s team predicted the outcome, correctly, 60 percent of the time?
Can you explain how an area of little activity controls maximal activity?
Persto: “I can’t dispute the infancy of neuroscience.
However, the infancy of neuroscience is not a defense of free will.”
Agreed. Nor is it a defense of determinism. We (neuroscientists, et al) just don’t know. Freewill/determinism issues are (Rumsfeldianly speaking) known unknowns. Until there’s some pretty clear solution to the hard problem of consciousness (cf Colin McGinn, et al), I’m happy to wallow in ignorance, while occasionally peeking at what the scientists are saying.
P.S. see #18 above.
Sure, we can mull over things more than, say, a slug, but so what?
Is that a serious question?
@Persto:
Libet got 350 milliseconds lead time now it is 10 seconds lead time!
I know I should really read the primary literature sometime. How can there possibly be 10 sec lead time? I do not even take for that long about virtually all decisions that could be unconscious. If I did, I’d have died in traffic a long time ago.
Decisions that take that long are the ones where I actually consciously weigh arguments in a way that would presumably make it very hard if not impossible to predict the outcome so long in advance – what if 2 sec into a 10 sec deliberation process about what to have on my pizza I remember that I had the salami that I was originally leaning towards last time, and then change my mind and go for something else for the sake of diversity? Or do you mean to say that cannot happen within seconds? Or that I actually “remembered” about the previous salami pizza another few seconds before I consciously remembered it, perhaps even a few seconds before the question was asked?
Quick decisions were not involved in the study. Here is what the subjects were asked to do:
“The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented. At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made. After subjects pressed their freely chosen response button, a ‘response mapping’ screen with four choices appeared. The subjects indicated when they had made their motor decision by selecting the corresponding letter with a second button press. After a delay, the letter stream started again and a new trial began.”
Now, “each letter was shown on the screen for 500 ms before switching to a new one and this was the time marker used by the researchers to determine when the decision to push a button was made. Note that in this experiment there are two decisions involved: when to push a button and which button to push.”
“[T]wo specific regions in the frontal and parietal cortex of the human brain had considerable information that predicted the outcome of a motor decision the subject had not yet consciously made. This suggests that when the subject’s decision reached awareness it had been influenced by unconscious brain activity for up to 10 s.
…
Notably, the lead times are too long to be explained by any timing inaccuracies in reporting the onset of awareness, which was a major criticism of previous studies. The temporal ordering of information suggests a tentative causal model of information flow, where the earliest unconscious precursors of the motor decision originated in frontopolar cortex, from where they influenced the buildup of decision-related information in the precuneus and later in SMA, where it remained unconscious for up to a few seconds.”
Does this help?
SMA is motor regions of the brain.
Thanks, that is a good explanation of the setup. I still have serious doubts though. Whether sitting around and idly deciding when to press one of two buttons is really the best case if you want to tell me that I make no conscious decisions in my life – e.g., about what career to take up, what car to buy, or what argument to make in a discussion about free will. Whether it really makes any difference if a subconscious me or a conscious me makes a decision – it is still me. And why it would be adaptive for us to evolve the illusion of conscious decision making if the decisions really were unconscious – why have consciousness at all if it is supposedly so expendable?
I have not said any of that. I said that Soon’s data destroyed libertarian free will.
Evolve the illusion? Why have consciousness?
You lost me.
The fMRI lighting up is you!
The reason we feel free arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.
Consciousness is not expendable it is just as important as you believe. Consciousness is where our thoughts become available to us.
Ten seconds sounded quite long to me as well, but I believe it. I can only speculate on how it’s possible, but I imagine that if you’re sitting in a chair with the instruction to push a button at some point, that you’d be sitting there waiting for the desire to arise, and there may well be longer precursors in the buildup of desire to the point where it becomes consciously manifest than when you’re responding to an immediate external prompt like a question.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if desiring pizza, going to a pizza parlor, and being asked what toppings you want would elicit a much quicker response than if somebody asked you out of the blue “If you were to eat a pizza, what would you want on it?” and that the quicker response may be partially due to the relevant memories and everything already being “preloaded” somehow.
‘course, what do I know? 🙂
Jerry, I’m interested to know how you’d counter the charge of making the category error.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, there is a nice, short Wikipedia article. Basically, it’s a matter of confusing the parts with the whole or the mechanics with the function. To claim that a person’s action is fully determined by any or all of the person’s parts is to make the category error. It doesn’t make sense to ascribe human or even animal actions to a brain or a particular state of the body. The brain, the body, its hormones, chemicals, limbs, etc, alone or together – none of these do things that can be described as choosing, falling in love, voting, showing empathy, going off to Zangongo to find a wife, eating chocolate, having philosophical doubts about what really causes one’s actions, etc.
If you read the Wikipedia article, you’ll notice a charming irony in my little challenge (and I have to say I’m a bit nervous here!): Gilbert Ryle’s whole mission in describing the category error was show how the dualism we inherited from Descarte depends on it, and here I am presenting it as a challenge to someone who decries all forms of dualism. I’m inclined think that even though you oppose dualism, your making the category error would imply a kind of dualism. One gets a whiff of this when you call Free Will an illusion. It evokes the image of Descarte’s ghost in the machine sitting behind the scenes interpreting things. I’m probably going a bit far here. Please don’t flame me. I mean it more as a bit of mischief than a serious attempt to paint you as a closet dualist.
Of course he’s making a categorical error. Its been pointed out to him several times.
BTW, Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind is, in my view, a little masterpiece and his entire goal was to take apart dualism, and expose that there is no ghost in the machine.
Did you recommend it to him when he ran that little competition? I wish I’d thought of it back then. The thing is, I can’t imagine someone of his calibre being unaware of the charge. He must have a response. C’mon Jerry we’re waiting here … tap tap tap … or do you think the charge is too insignificant?
Yep. Category error. Also bad reductionism.
Mulling over these threads I think I’m beginning to understand the hostility to compatibilism from Jerry and others. This has baffled me for a while, since compatibilism seems to me innocuous and differing from Jerry’s stance only in semantics.
The difference stems simply from the hyper-religiosity of today’s America, which has resulted in many words being infused with the religious connotations of American culture. Thus Jerry etal are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion of religious woo, and reject these wordings.
However, in the more secular European culture, those same words don’t have the same connotations of religious woo. That means that atheistic determinists see nothing wrong with using them in a determined context — and doing that for “free” and “choice” etc is all that compatibilism amounts to.
That’s why the “Americans” here are highly suspicious of compatibilism, suspecting it of being a stalking horse for dualistic religious woo, whereas the “Europeans” here are baffled by why their repeated denials of this don’t seem to register. (Of course the two groups likely don’t map to continents quite that neatly!)
Hence Jerry’s comment above that, to him, “moral responsibility” connotes religion and God, whereas to me it doesn’t, and I suspect that it doesn’t do so to most Brits.
One interesting implication is that the “commentary” of our criminal justice systems is already very different, with religiose America emphasizing retributive suffering, and secular Europe having long moved to thinking more about deterrence, public protection and rehabilitation.
That change happens naturally, not because of any different stance on dualistic free will (I suspect that most of the British public never really considers that issue, and would split roughly 50:50 if you asked them), but instead happens simply through secularism, which leads naturally to more pragmatic and less moralistic attitudes.
So the fault here is not really with public attitudes to “free will”, but rather it is with the hyper-religiosity of the US. But then we already knew that. And you’re not going to change American attitudes on this until America becomes much less religious, and once it does so the changes will occur anyhow.
The irony is then, as has been pointed out repeatedly by various people from Eric McDonald to one of the authors mentioned by JC above, that the religious can live quite happily with determinism, as it follows logically from an omniscient deity.
(They only play the free will card when confronted with the problem of evil, with their typical lack of concern about whether their apologetics are internally consistent.)
The term “Free Will” never made sense to me. It has baffled me since my childhood in church where they spoke about it a lot (“God gave us free will”). I never encountered the term in the Bible and I never encountered a satisfactory explanation at university. Basically, I know what the Will is but what is the *Free* Will? Is it Will that you get on some shopping channel? Does it come as a “free” extra? Or has it got something to do with Free Willy?
Seriously, people ask “What do you want?” and no-one, on hearing your answer, asks “But, what do you freely want.” I’m inclined to think that that is because it is nonsense to put the two words together. Back in my churchgoing youth I’d ask people to tell me the difference between plain old Will and Free Will? And don’t tell me it’s the free exercise of the will because then I’m going to ask you what the difference is between that and plain old Freedom.
Jerry gives the standard definition I got given at university, but I can’t see how that definition makes any sense. Having the entire universe roll back to the state it was in at the point of a choice is not merely an obvious physical impossibility, it is a logical impossibility – a square triangle, the set of Everything unable to contain itself. It’s all very well for a giant clockworks to be rolled back but the universe is Everything and cannot have something else roll it back or even observe the rollback. That should be obvious, but the point is that to conceive of such a rollback is to conceive of an observation or cause of that rollback and therefore not of a rollback of Everything. So we have a square triangle – the definition doesn’t make sense and neither does any attempt to debunk it. We are left with just Will and Freedom and Choice. Any and all of these may be illusions as Jerry would have it or at least require redefinition but “Free Will” simply requires removal from our vocabulary.
Of course, we may take the softer definition that Free Will is simply that given the same choice again, one can choose differently. That leaves us with something that can’t be tested with scientific methods, and maybe rightfully so, but my real problem is again, that I can’t see the point of the term. How is that any different from how we ordinarily conceive of the plain old Will – that it is a matter of making a choice? And what would be the relevance of freedom? It doesn’t affect the Will. Wanting something is not contingent on being able to have it.
The other soft definition, which simply contrasts Free Will with doing something because you are caused to do it (and then denies its existence on the premiss that everything is caused) is subject to a similar objection. The premiss that all our actions are caused is fatal to the notion of plain Will so it makes no sense to differentiate between Will and Free Will when arguing for determinism.
Whichever way I look at it, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Throw it out, I say. I think we’re more likely to get somewhere talking about plain old Will and Freedom and Choice.
Beachscriber,
I have to ask, have you never heard of a thought experiment? You do refer to going to a university, and yet it seems by this passage as if the concept of a thought experiment is complete unknown to you.
I’m saying it goes beyond a mere thought experiment, a mere imaginary scenario. In the case of the universe, it becomes a contradiction in terms on par with talk of a square triangle. Just because you can throw the words Universe and rollback together doesn’t mean to say you have a conceivable scenario. Whichever way I imagine it – an actual rolling back or just somehow back at the same point – it makes no sense when I unpack it.
But I’m OK with being wrong about that. My main point, that throwing Free and Will together doesn’t make sense, is more important because it shows an ignorance or disregard of what Will is. Will on its own is a matter of making a choice and wanting something is not contingent on freedom to have it. “Free” is redundant.
In that case, I’d say you need to take your case to those who assert the existence of free will. (JAC asserts the opposite.) Non-free willists have frequently pointed out that the very concept of free will is incoherent.
Yes, I am arguing that it is incoherent as opposed to being non-existent, or needing redefinition as Jerry would have.
However, in the next breath you’ll have me arguing that plain Will, Choice, Reason, etc. make perfect sense and cannot be sensibly be construed products of bodily and environmental mechanics. *** Making a choice is a matter of having a reason. If anyone can show me how a reason can have a cause and therefore how a choice can have a cause, I might just happily walk over to the other side. ***
So for you, coherence is not a requirement of things that exist?
If it were true that reasons are random (without any causes), this would not make the will free, only random.
But it is not true, it is easy to see how it is that reasons are very much caused.
Sorry, it took a while but I can I can finally see how you might read that from the way I put it. I’m just distinguishing my position from that of people who think Free Will is a conceivable thing but just doesn’t exist (like a unicorn). I’m more inclined to call it nonsense than fiction (like a one-sided page or a drink of wood). Putting Free and Will together shows you haven’t thought through what they are.
I still haven’t managed to bend my stiff old brain around the second part of what you say. Here are two examples of a reason for a choice:
I’ll have coffee this morning because I’m tired of having tea.
I’m outa here now because I need to get some work done.
Could you show me how such reasons could have a cause of the sort scientists talk about.
I must be missing something here, because I see no problem whatsoever between absence of free will and accountability.
If there is no free will, then the concept of accountability and punishing wrongdoers is irrelevant. The wrongdoer had no choice in his or her actions, and we have no choice in the method by which we punish him or her.
It is not more complicated than that.
Is it just that this is an uncomfortable thought, or is there a real logical problem with this stance?
Uncomfortable Thoughts and that nagging subject experience of feeling like we make free choices. The stance with the logical problem would be the stance that there is such a thing as free will.
If we think of modeling the physical world as a computation, then an important consideration comes in. Computations can be broken into different classes and one class, which encompasses most of them, has the property that there is no short cut to the result. Even if all the input is exactly known, and the rules are exact, there is no way to predict the result. One simply has to go through the entire process.
Think the weather, or the economy, or the future course of evolution. This might give one the illusion of free will. We might plan to do something tomorrow but tomorrow we ‘change our mind’ and do something different. There was no way we could really anticipate what we actually finally did. Even if no novel inputs occurred.
Now think of a pencil perfectly balanced on its tip in an enclosure with no air currents and perfectly isolated from outside disturbances. It is only buffeted by the air molecules around it and subject to gravity. A molecule hits it from one side and it starts to tip to one side but then another molecule hits it and it tips another way. It performs a kind of random walk until it gets so far from the balance point that gravity finally has its way and the pencil falls in a certain direction. It’s deterministic but unpredictable or perhaps quantum randomness enters. In any case, would you say that the pencil was an ‘agent’ and that it ‘made a decision’? Would you say the pencil had free will?
Now think of the visual illusion produced by a drawing of a staircase of blocks. First it looks like the blocks project out one way. Then after a while it flips and they project out the opposite way. Do you have the free will to control which way they project?
Now suppose that you have been impressively taught by your parents: When buying an electronic device never buy the warranty if the device costs less than $500 and always buy the warranty if it cost over $1000. You have been strongly programmed in such cases and your action is automatic. But now you are purchasing a device for $750. Should you buy the warranty? You don’t know. You dither. One factor pushes you one way; another factor pushes you another way. There is time pressure pushing you to make a decision. Finally you think: “What the heck, I’ll buy the warranty.” Congratulations you made a decision. But how is this different in principle than that pencil being buffeted by the air molecules? We all make lots of decisions of that category. It gives us an illusion of free will – but it’s not.
I am sure your hypothetical parents must have said something like “Flip a coin if the purchase price is $500.01 through $999.99”.
I’m sure this is something philosophers have discussed before, but not being aware of the literature, it seems to me there is a weird instability about the hard incompatibilist position advocated by Jerry. This is quite possibly a very naive question.
He believes that determinism rules out the possibility of genuine moral responsibility. When it comes to punishment, for instance, it should be based deterrence, not desert, since there is no robust sense in which people deserve praise or blame for their actions. If we know that punishing someone will have zero deterrent value, we have no justification for the punishment, even if the person did in fact commit the crime.
But the previous paragraph is soaked in normative language. It talks about how we should punish people and when punishment is justified. In making the claim that determinism has consequences for how we should act, we’re treating ourselves as moral agents. The assumption is that we have ethical obligations. But shouldn’t obligation go out of the window along with responsibility? If no one is truly morally responsible, that applies to us as well. Whence this obligation to be consequentialist about punishment?
In other words, if one accepts Jerry’s form of hard incompatibilism, it seems that further discussion of how this should change our practice is moot. There’s no moral agent left to whom a “should” could apply.
Yes, the same idea I was trying to convey in 28. I’d love to read a good response.
Yes, that is another strong argument against Jerry’s position. He reduces the life to one big Is and, on the one hand, seems to correctly conclude that we cannot derive any Aughts from the Is while, on the other hand, he hands out some surprisingly consequential Aughts for living life as Is.
Ergo free will.
I do think that we are basically psychologically incapable of fully assimilating the philosophical position Jerry advocates. Like Kant says, no matter what we learn about the structure of the world, we must, at some deep level, operate under the assumption of free will. I don’t know how one could engage in coherent practical reasoning without at lest treating ourselves as subject to some form of normativity.
Now does this mean I think we should deny the findings of science? No, not really. Compatibilists don’t deny the truth of macroscopic determinism. Jerry’s main concern about compatibilism seems to be that it distorts the traditional meaning of terms like “free will” and “choice”. Maybe that’s true. But so what? We evolve revised conceptions of traditional notions all the time. “Atom” literally means “uncuttable”, but we don’t believe atoms are indivisible any longer.
Given that I don’t think hard incompatibilism is a position that can be coherently maintained, I think we have two options: maintain the traditional conception of free will and reject science (libertarianism), or revise the traditional conception of free will to cohere with science (compatibilism). The latter is obviously the superior alternative.
Yes, whether free will exists and whether we live day to day as if it exists are not the same thing. One is a philosophical/scientific discussion, the other is a practical approach to sanity.
I believe free will does not exist, and yet I make “decisions” every moment. I pretend. This contradiction does not bother me.
To me, this is like the discovery that the retina actually turns everything upside-down, and yet, we have no problem sorting out up from down. There’s no reason to deny the science, but there’s also no reason to change our behavior and begin vacuuming the ceiling.
“This just in: There is no free will. Carry on.”
Pirate,
Non-free willists ARE trying to revise the traditional conception of free will from real to not real: only an illusion.
Ok, then what is the advantage of “non-free-willism” over compatibilism?
Which form of compatibilism?
A) Compatibilism that in some way says to the effect, yes the universe is deterministic, but this fact does not preclude the realness of libertarian free will because (fill in the blank).
or
b) Compatibilism that says something like, absolutely there is no such thing as libertarian free will, but we advocate calling the non-free will, free will anyway for these reasons: (fill in the blank).
I agree with JAC’s assessment of free will. But I’m no scientist or mathematician, so I don’t understand why quantum theory doesn’t affect things.
If you “rewind” the universe back to the point you made your decision such that all particles are as they were, doesn’t quantum theory dictate that there will be different behavior?
Robin I’d be interested to hear your thoughts re my argument that such a rewind is fine for a giant clockworks but literally nonsense in the case of the universe. See my post above, #27.
Robin,
How best to explain to you that the randomness that you are imagining does not introduce any freedom to any decisions?
Right. If I write a hypothetical computer program that will generate a (truly) random number (perhaps utilizing quantum randomness), I will get a random result each time, but I do not choose the result, nor does the computer nor the program.
By definition, random means not chosen. It is the opposite of free.
You can keep backing up, “Well, a random fluctuation allowed me to choose differently this time … ” but then the random fluctuation is where the determination was made, not in your illusion of choice. Once the fluctuation had occurred, you were bound to “choose” the result that the fluctuation required you.
itchy,
That made sense to me, let’s see if your explanation works for Robin.